Jaak Panksepp, the inventor of the term "affective neuroscience", is regarded as a radical in his field, with ground-breaking insights into emotional issues ranging from depression to playfulness. What makes him radical? First, his study of animal emotions, and his data-supported assertion that …

Writing that reads effortlessly takes great pain to create. Here are a few principles for making each word count.<p><i>By Gregory Ciotti, writer at Help Scout.</i><p>"As for how to write well," writes Paul Graham, "here's the short version: Write a bad version 1 as fast as you can; rewrite it over and over; cut …

In his latest book, "The Sense of Style," Harvard cognitive scientist and linguist Steven Pinker explores the most common words and phrases that people stumble over.<p>The book is like a modern version of Strunk and White's classic "The Elements of Style," but one based on linguistics and updated for …

Everyone is now expected to add punctuation when writing, but that wasn’t always the case. It took centuries for the English language to build up the list of rules that has now become commonplace. Here’s a brief look at how we came to use these well-known punctuation marks.<p><b>Colons, commas, and</b> …